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The Translation Committee is one of the committees involved in the Organization for Transformative Works.
The Translation committee is an all-volunteer team with members from all over the world. It makes content from the OTW and its projects accessible to fans in languages other than English. It also helps other OTW committees and volunteer pools communicate with fans and users in various languages. Additionally, the committee collaborates with the AO3 Abuse and Support teams to translate user messages and requests, and help answer non-English comments on public posts.

Internally, the committee is divided into translators and staff. Translators work in language teams; they create and proofread translated texts. Staff coordinate the language teams and take care of administrative tasks surrounding translation work, such as making and uploading documents, tracking deadlines, interviewing potential translators, and training new volunteers.

The OTW is made up of over 500 volunteers from all over the world working in various committees—by necessity, in order to get us all working together, a lot of the OTW's day-to-day work and output is in English. Translation committee’s 170+ volunteers translate some of the vast OTW material from English into some of the many languages that OTW members and OTW project users speak.

Translators work in language teams of various sizes—from the huge 15-person German team to newer teams, like Kiswahili, Marathi and Latvian, with only one translator so far. As of February 2017, Translation has 34 language teams of varying sizes: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, European Portuguese, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, Korean, Lavian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh. The committee is always on the lookout for opportunities to start new language teams! For more up-to-date information, check out their Translation Committee page.

Map

Concentration of OTW Translation members around the world as of June 2016

This map shows the concentration of OTW Translation members around the world as of June 2016, with countries with more members shaded darker. (Only members who were willing to appear on the map have been included.) The map shows people's nationality or residence status, depending on what each volunteer chose to use.